AuthorTopic: wish list - LiveCD rescue suite (Read 6020 times)

Please enter your wishes for applications to be included in a future LiveCD as part of a Rescue-Recovery-Toolkit suite. For now, let's just gather all the useful utilities, and later decide which to include on Live CD, and which to include on Live DVD.

If GTK Hardware Lister does what I think it does, I would like to put it on all my systems, as standard operating procedure. I found GParted to be very useful when experimenting with Puppy, where GParted is included on its liveCD.

I don't think you can assume that most users know about System Rescue CD, nor that an individual user is inclined to take the trouble to download it, burn it, and know how to make use of it.

The suite doesn't have to be complete, just a nice selection of useful tools, say, 10 utilities/tools, as a convenience to users of the liveCD.

EDIT: I just had a long look at my copy of SystemRescueCd 0.3, and I think it's not so easy to use. You get the command line by default. It's text based. I hunted for 10 minutes trying to find GParted, never found it, although I'm sure it's there.

Is this a general recovery cd? or is a tool to recover a VL install? I think Joe is suggesting the second one, because the first one is already covered by SR cd. I like the idea and I think should be a VL recovery cd plus all the tools can fit in a cd for general rescue tasks, and may be some docs about howto diagnose a problem.Memtest should be in that list. Badram is a tool to prevent the system to access a bad memory sector, needs a kernel patch I think. I used both of them in the past, really useful tools.

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I just had a long look at my copy of SystemRescueCd 0.3, and I think it's not so easy to use. You get the command line by default. It's text based. I hunted for 10 minutes trying to find GParted, never found it, although I'm sure it's there.

VL 5.8 Standard Live final does have GParted on it. As far as system information tools, I have tried a couple of GTK apps myself (could not remember their names) but was not very impressed - they were just regurgitating information from /proc.

I work on older, unknown status computers all the time with VL, and I find the following command line tools (once you learn to read them) offer all the info I ever need about the system and the hardware:

dmesg is particularly useful for checking whether the kernel sees all the hardware (also gives you a hardware make and model) and will also spit out immediate errors for things like defective hard drives, CDROM drives, USB devices. It also tells you whether the parallel, serial, NIC ports, etc are working and is also useful for diagnosing ACPI/APM issues. Takes some effort to learn to read it but is probably the most useful hardware diagnostic tool for me.

For the true geek the /proc filesystem tells you almost everything about your hardware. It is fun to browse with mc.

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dmesg is particularly useful for checking whether the kernel sees all the hardware (also gives you a hardware make and model) and will also spit out immediate errors for things like defective hard drives, CDROM drives, USB devices. It also tells you whether the parallel, serial, NIC ports, etc are working and is also useful for diagnosing ACPI/APM issues. Takes some effort to learn to read it but is probably the most useful hardware diagnostic tool for me.

The whole point of having a sysinfo tool/application is so one doesnt have to root around with multiple commands to find out what is under the hood. Instead the information is collected and presented in a readable, organized fashion in a single place, in one stroke.

Suppose, for example, that customer is on the phone with tech support, and the techs need to know what's inside the computer, in order to assist with a problem. Customer runs sysinfo tool, relays info to techs.

I urge the curious to try Everest Home Edition, to see what a good sysinfo tool can be. Everest was originally Aida32, which in turn evolved from Aida16, still available on UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD). Although Everest has recently gone commercial, you can get a slightly older freeware version here:http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=everesthome

I recently checked out all the system information tools in UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD). There are 5 or 6 sysinfo utilities available on the second page of the first category. (Press F1 to select Disk Utilities, then press right-pointer navigation key to access page 2 of utilities.) One or two of the sysinfo utilities don't work, but I urge the curious to try the ones that do, especially Aida16. It's kinda odd that when the utility is called, up comes a Linux initialization, but when the utility is closes, it acts like DOS. Go figure.